Textbooks of macroeconomics regularly remind their readers that they should not interpret the macroeconomic price variable as some sort of average price. Instead it represents some price index indicating the average of the individual items' price changes between the period considered and some...

The standard measure of core or underlying inflation is the inflation rate excluding food and energy prices. This paper constructs an alternative measure, the weighted median inflation rate, for 38 advanced and emerging economies using subclass level disaggregation of the CPI over 1990-2021, and...

In this paper, we review the German practice of imputing the costs of owner-occupied housing by increasing the relative weight of actual rents in the CPI. As the structure of owner-occupied housing differs substantially from that of rental housing, this variant of the imputation method may cause...

The treatment of owner-occupied housing costs is a recurring problem in the construction of consumer price indices, and there are competing methodologies. In the most widely-used Irish index, the Payments Approach, which attaches a weight to a term involving historical house prices and an...

Lacking data on price levels across locations (countries, national regions, etc.) for crossspace comparisons, researchers resort to local consumer price indexes (CPIs) over time to evaluate these levels.This approach unfortunately fails to specify, even generally, the exactness of such...

The paper presents a consumer price index for Denmark 1502-2007. For the post-1815 period the index is based on existing CPI figures whereas new data has been constructed for the pre-1815 period. For the earliest years 1502-1712 the new CPI covers only the price of corn, whereas the period...

The treatment of owner-occupied housing costs is a recurring problem in the construction of consumer price indices, and there are competing methodologies. In the most widely-used Irish index, the Payments Approach, which attaches a weight to a term involving historical house prices and an...

This paper considers the problem of aggregation in the case of large linear dynamic panels, where each micro unit is potentially related to all other micro units, and where micro innovations are allowed to be cross sectionally dependent. Following Pesaran (2003), an optimal aggregate function is...

This study addresses two significant limitations in the literature on cross-country expenditure comparisons: (a) treatment of all countries, large and small, as single entities with no spatial differences inside the countries, and (b) use of Divisia price indices, rather than preference based...

How do house price changes affect the cost of living? The retail price index in the UK does not directly incorporate house price changes. Instead it uses mortgage interest to capture the cost of owning a home. This is a useful method from many perspectives. However, from a consumer welfare...